Anju Dodiya’s Ancestral Log at Frieze Masters ( Studio) by Vadehra Art Gallery unfolds like a series of textured, reflective refrains filled with intuitively feminine orientations woven into surreal edged simplicity. The Vadehra note says: In ‘Ancestral Log’, Dodiya considers the artists of the past as ancestors and the studio as an ongoing logbook, exploring the side stories – sometimes calm and often stormy – of domesticity, creativity and the restlessness of contemporary living.
In an interview many moons ago with me, she said : “ After years of creating beauty with watercolours, I decided to temper my works by drawing in gray a colour, from the idea of a precious image , I fought it with charcoal.” Using watercolour, charcoal, and soft pastel on fabric stretched on board her 3 main works echo realms of woven webs laced in the shards of feminine fiction.Dodiya’s titles play between the realms of her practice as a voracious reader .
Orchard Notes 2025
Above all , across the evolution of her own odyssey it is her titles that stand like metaphors of memory woven into her private moorings.Orchard Notes is a masterpiece in melancholia as well as emotive associations.Form and foliage are her secret allies, her perfection at abstracting their semblance and creating multiple narratives is what keeps her stories coming in ways both mesmerising as well as succinct.
Arachne and the Pearl 2025
The Frieze magazine quotes her on Japanese prints in which she says:
“ Images from ukiyo-e albums, newspaper photos, and the beloved frescoes of Italy barge into my studio space, elbowing each other to assemble an emotional theatre in pale, imagined rooms. On charcoal-black nights, I pretend I am Arachne weaving webs. I am also Penelope, who will undo it all before the morning.”
The myth of Arachne is a series of juxtapositions that she plays with as she narrates the tale from Greek mythology, of a Lydian woman, thought by some to be a princess, who was highly gifted in the art of weaving.The human figure and abstraction weave a web of fascination .
A measure of Happiness 2025
In the third work on fabric she takes many women and creates a corollary of conversations. In the Frieze note she explains:
“ Electronic devices, with their blue light, bring reminders of the tragic legacies of disappearing trees, fires in the world and blood-soaked clothing. The elegance and the violence around me are brief gestures that I need to grasp. The woman is several ages at once – she is a girl, a woman, a mother. She doesn’t speak of unhappiness, just abrasion. She paints red. Not blood. Every sharp edge here, every fragment, every shard is fiction.”
Welcoming but visibly uncomfortable, the series of portraits are both at once familiar and enigmatic. These faces are powerfully poetic as well as pensive, in the mixture of charcoal and watercolour, she creates scenes, both reassuring as well as resonance of time past and time present.
Fragmented portraits on paper
16 small watercolour on paper works deal with fragmented portraits that ponder about loneliness, as well as an emotional antenna of sorts within the shapes that occupy her mind. All through her evolution she has said she is always deeply aware of her own heightened awareness and the darkened recesses she inhabits. Paper Storm 2010 is a stirring watercolour.
Fragment 7 and Fragment 11
Amongst the paper works Fragment 7 and 11 have their own aura of darkened recesses. Drawn/painted at dusk, or at sunset, in the night light or translated from her dreams, these portraits are presented solely in their relationship to time and space, shaped through a coda of solitude that, defines the artist’s practice that centres on a reinterpretation of ‘ multiple historical sources as varied as medieval tapestries, Italian Renaissance painters, Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints and newspaper photographs.’
The beauty of these smaller works is that viewers can conjure a more symbolic layer that may be woven into the fabric of her series of biographical narratives, perhaps an artistic reimagining of the ancestral myths that she has gathered as a voracious reader and a frequent visitor of European museums.
Put together, these works curated by the brilliant Sheena Wagstaff, highlights Frieze Masters’ London’s commitment to living practice in dialogue with historical art.It also reaffirms the artist’s full-time preoccupations from all hours as they add a mythological element to the tensions inherent in Anju Dodiya’s vision of past and present. Poise and posture, gesture and gravitas everything comes together to create a synthesis of formal parallels. More intriguing is how Dodiya is able to explore the charged dynamics of desire, desolation, transgression, and artistic collaboration between ancestors and an artist of this millennium.Ultimately art lovers can walk away with images of fragmented portraits, and human hands, textural terrain and backdrops, where lucid narrative references are imbued with personal grace and quietude.
IMAGES: VADEHRA ART GALLERY DELHI
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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